The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus

"The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus" is one of Cy Twombly's most ambitious early paintings, executed in 1961 during the period when he was emerging from the influence of Abstract Expressionism and developing the personal vocabulary of scribbles, words, and gestural marks that would make him famous. The title refers to the mountain home of the Muses in Greek mythology, and the "return" suggests both the artist's arrival at creative maturity and the historical cycle by which ancient culture is continually rediscovered and reinterpreted. The composition is a large canvas—200 × 260 centimeters—covered with layers of wax crayon, lead pencil, oil paint, and colored pencil that create a dense, palimpsest-like surface where earlier marks are partially obscured by later additions, suggesting the accumulated deposits of time and memory. The technique is extraordinarily physical: Twombly worked on the floor, attacking the canvas with sweeping arm movements that left traces of his body's energy in the scribbled lines and smeared colors. This performative aspect connects the painting to the action painting of Pollock and de Kooning, though Twombly's marks are more calligraphic, more suggestive of writing than the purely gestural brushwork of his predecessors. The "Parnassus" series of 1961 established themes that Twombly would explore throughout his career: the relationship between ancient and modern, the dialogue between word and image, and the role of the artist as a kind of scribe or prophet who translates cultural memory into contemporary form. Art historians have compared these works to the contemporaneous experiments of Rauschenberg and Johns, noting that Twombly's treatment is more European, more historically engaged than these American contemporaries. The painting also reflects the artist's personal circumstances in 1961: he had recently returned to New York from Italy and was reencountering the American art world with the perspective of European history.

This 1961 palimpsest canvas established Twombly's mature vocabulary through layered wax-crayon calligraphic attack, translating Greek mythological Parnassus into bodily performative scrawl while bridging European historical memory with American action painting.

It matters because Twombly scribbled on a huge canvas and called it coming home from the mountain of the Muses—proving that even mess could be a map if the title was ancient enough.